Vera Wang / Spring 2012 RTW

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Vera Wang is with Alexander Wang this season—they’re both thinking of sport, though the way they’ve executed it (the former uptown and the latter downtown) diverges right from first look. Where Alexander Wang has been dealing in biker-wear with perforated, synthetic-looking materials, Vera Wang’s world of sport is only about pristine eyelets and parkas in couture-grade cotton piqué. She’s also not content to concern herself with anything literal: her versions of utility-wear abandoned whatever practical sources they began with and crossed into exercises in conceptualism and romance.

She’s on the same general wavelength as so many designers in New York Fashion Week. Tucked in amongst the complexities of the peplums, vests, hoods, and many sheer layers she cut, the collection picked up on shorts, trailing short-in-the-front skirts, and print—all the emerging New York trends. The fact that she stepped into color was a personal breakthrough for Wang, not to mention the print, which she described as a “trippy” distortion of Marie Antoinette’s wallpaper.

Ultimately, though, for all its finesse in the materials and finish, it was the simpler looks that have a more direct appeal to wearability, like her beautiful white eyelet tunic over tulle leggings. Considering all the pre-eminent skills and precious fabric Vera Wang has at her fingertips, you just sometimes wish she’d allow herself to show us something a little simpler to put on.